Recap Of New SEM Tools

The past few weeks have been pretty busy in terms of new search marketing tools appearing. In this article, a recap of some things that have hit my radar recently, ranging from AdWords keyword generation tools to link analysis tools to Firefox add-ons for marketers.

Generate Local Adwords & Keyword Lists: Lets you enter keywords you want to target, then a US ZIP code, a radius and other controls to generate a list of terms you can use to localize AdWords targeting. The terms created probably are useful for Yahoo, as well. However, be aware that both Google and Yahoo already give you some tools to localize without having to generate a list of keywords linked to cities. To me, this is most useful if you don’t want to make use of those existing tools. Want to discuss more? See this SEW Forum thread, Localizing Keywords with Google Adwords.

The Permutator: Keyword generation tool especially designed for Google AdWords campaigns, currently costing US $50.

About This Site: For Firefox, gives you easy access to Alexa, Google, OPD and other data sources that provide information about pages from across the web. Spotted among Dave Naylor’s list of favorite Firefox extensions. Below are two others I particularly liked from that list.

User Agent Switcher Extension: Want to pretend that you are a particular search engine spider? If you know its user agent name, you can add it to this tool for Firefox and pretend you are from Google, Yahoo or whatever. Note this won’t let you see any cloaked pages delivered through IP detection.

HTML Validator: You don’t need to have valid HTML code to get indexed or rank well with search engines. They’re pretty forgiving. Still, if you’re wondering if a page has a particular problem, this tool for Firefox lets you check for HTML errors.

Best Ranking Tool isn’t a tool but a recent forum thread where members are discussing various rank checking tools they like.

GoLexa:Spotted via fantomaster, this is a very cool tool for site owners indeed. It brings back Google results and provides a ton of extra information about the pages listed. Want to see the pages indexed on each Google data center? Need WHOIS info for page? Want a simulation of how a search engine spider might see the page? Traffic data from Alexa? This and more is offered. Check out the About page for a fast rundown on everything.

SEO Browser: Not a browser but a way to better understand what search engines might see when they index your pages. The free simply mode effectively shows a text-only version of the page with hyperlinks enabled. The advanced/login mode gives you stats on keyword density, backlinks, words in the body copy and more. The advanced mode can be used one day for free or you can purchase a subscription to last for different lengths of time. Want to know more? SEO Browser at the High Rankings Forum has a discussion, as does the SEO-Browser thread at our own forum, where one of tool’s creators, Ian McAnerin, is also a moderator.

UrlTrends: Another catch via fantomaster, this lets you enter any URL and get back data about it, such as backlinks from major search engines and any trend data about link popularity and other factors it may have accumulated. It sounds like if anyone generates a report for a particular URL, that URL is then automatically tracked over time.

Yahoo Link Harvester: Uses the Yahoo API to let you find links pointing at a particular domain or individual page. You can get back up to 1,000 listings. You can then easily get WHOIS info, Alexa info, Google full cache or text-only cache copy of the domain that the link is hosted on.

Huh? I ran a check for those linking to http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html, the George W. Bush official biography that ranks tops on Google and Yahoo for a search on “miserable failure.” Doing it at Yahoo showed me these results, the third of which was this page: http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/˜jones/step/. That page is linking to the Bush bio (it’s a hidden link, you’ll only see it in the source code). But Link Harvest shows info for the domain this is hosted at, www.cs.uiowa.edu, not the page itself. So the cached copies? They won’t bring up the actual page with the link but rather the overall domain hosting them.

Links are nicely grouped into top level domains, so you can see all the links coming from .edu sites, .gov sites and so on. It’s a helpful way to get an at-a-glance view of organizations linking.

FYI, I sometimes had problems getting results, even when trying the mirror sites here and here. This seemed due to a glitch with the Yahoo API. Also note that while you are supposed to remove the http:// prefix, I found in the example above that I didn’t get correct results unless I added it.

Don’t want to use this on someone else’s server? Get the source code for your own.

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.